Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Almost certainly, at least relative to what its sales wound up being. D&D was doing very well in the niche hobby wargame market and as the market creator in the new RPG market (which also drew in a broader sci-fi and fantasy fan market), but when they were writing those books they couldn't know that the James Dallas Egbert III incident would make D&D national news in late '79 and it would turn into a cultural fad. The core books were published '77-'79 and the giant boom sales years were 1980 to 1983.
I'm also thinking of that interview with Gary when he mentioned that ascending AC made more sense and he thought about switching to that for AD&D, but decided it was too late. "Everyone" was already familiar with descending. He wasn't expecting the market to be so much bigger than the existing fanbase.
This is a fair point. I think people are using the term in different senses. By your definition, for example, the original Unearthed Arcana was almost indisputably a cash grab. It's a bunch of Dragon Magazine articles and some new classes, rules, and spells that were barely or not at all playtested and of dubious balance (like the absurdly powerful Cavalier and Barbarian, or the practically-worthless Thief-Acrobat) and was rushed to production to give the company a desperately-needed cash infusion.
1E as a whole wasn't such a rushed-out product, although a major motivation in its development and publication was to try to cut Dave Arneson out of royalties, which is a purely monetary factor. Well, maybe not even purely monetary there. As Gary getting only his own name on the covers probably weighed in as well.
If one's definition of "cash grab" is just "primarily motivated by money", then yeah, one could argue that every single edition of D&D was that. Even OD&D, though their expectations for that were humble.
I had a somewhat different experience with 3.5. I remember that the original pitch was minor tweaks, but that the eventual changes were sufficiently extensive that the books wound up largely incompatible with each other.
Although in general that period did feel kind of cash-grabby to me. The incredible number of hardcover books they were putting out became unappealing and impossible for me to keep up with. But I still got a LARGE number of them. Some of them, though, I really thought seemed pointless and unnecessary. At least for the games I was playing in.
And I think this was a not-insignificant factor in the pushback 4E got, that people had been buying a TON of books in the preceding four years if they wanted to keep up with 3.5, and the prospect of restarting the whole cycle was another factor (on top of GSL vs OGL, the bad 4E marketing insulting fans, the extensive overall revision and slaying of sacred cows, and the failure of Gleemax and vaporware of the promised 4E VTT) inclining a lot of fans to stick with 3.5 or hop over to Pathfinder instead of adopting 4E.
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